Belief in God is a matter of faith not proof!

If makind is to choose responsibily (and isn’t that a big part of maturation in life?), he (she) must learn what it is that they are choosing. And that doesn’t happen by dictating such-n-such actions, nor does it develop by “Smothers-love“.

All forms of totalitarianism, be it secular or religious is damnable!

Evil is the attempt of religion or denominations to impose automatic and unthinking responses and actions to life- especially church life. Hugh Montefiore added, “The inculcation of a particular moral code of conduct by fear of physical punishment or spiritual penalty does more harm than good.”

Try to covince your pastor, priest, or minister of that!

In the many choices that we all make (good and bad), we either learn to accept the lvoe of God, or reject it. The GOOD NEWS is that we can only reject it on this side of our dematerialization. There will come a time when we truly SEE the incredible POWER of God’s love that our freedom chooses none other than IT:-)

We no longer have TIME for God!

Remember when almost everyone went to church on Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and mid week? It’s rare now that you’ll see a sign on a church that has three different services. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Americans seldom go to the ONE service. If there’s ANYTHING else that’s an option, people will forgo church. Movie, dinner, sports for the kids, work, leisure, vacation, or whatever! Church is no longer a priority.

Ask George Barna!

And then there’s this MONEY thing. The latest world wide survey of Christians (I wonder how they do this?) showed an annual income of $8,600,000,000,000.00! That’s TRILLION! Of that amount, they spent 97% on themselves, gave 2% to building programs, and gave the church ONE PERCENT for general use.

I don’t know about you but I think Christians around the world are missing the Kingdom principles as well as missing great opportunities to do some mighty things for OUR Jesus, OUR God!

A book of letters written by Mother Teresa of Calcutta reveals for the first time that she was deeply tormented about her faith and suffered periods of doubt about God. “Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear,” she wrote the Rev. Michael van der Peet in September 1979.

Due out on September 4, “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light” is a collection of letters written to colleagues and superiors over 66 years. In the United States it will be published by Doubleday, an imprint of Random House, which is owned by German media group Bertelsmann. Mother Teresa had wanted all her letters destroyed, but the Vatican ordered they be preserved as potential relics of a saint, a spokeswoman for Doubleday said.

Mother Teresa has been beatified but not yet canonized.

“I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love,” she wrote to one adviser. “If you were (there), you would have said, ‘What hypocrisy.”‘ The book was compiled and edited by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, a proponent of her sainthood and senior member of the Missionaries of Charity order that she founded. The letters likely would do little to affect her cause for sainthood as church history is dotted with saints who have been tormented about their faith.

The Mother Teresa letters stand in marked contrast to her public image as a selfless and tireless minister for the poor who was driven by faith. “I’ve never read a saint’s life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented,” the Rev. James Martin, an editor at Jesuit magazine America and the author of “My Life with the Saints,” told Time.

A couple examples include:

“Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself — for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead,” she wrote in 1953. “It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.” Then in 1956: “Such deep longing for God — and … repulsed — empty — no faith — no love — no zeal. (Saving) souls holds no attraction — Heaven means nothing — pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything.” And then in 1959: “If there be no God — there can be no soul — if there is no Soul then Jesus — You also are not true. I utter words of community prayers — and try my utmost to get out of every word the sweetness it has to give — but my prayer of union is not there any longer — I no longer pray.”

Too many people are wrapped up in DOING, when what My Jesus, My God, your Jeus, your God, just want intimacy with us. The “other stuff” will follow.

1-Does your God give you the parking lot space of your choice, so you won’t have to walk in the rain or heat, while not healing your husband of cancer?

2-Does your God root for your favorite baseball team leading them to victory while not healing your son of a heart disease?

3-Does your God act like a Victorian father ready to punish you- even brutally so to get you to be good?

4-Does your God expect blind obedience to the most insane of commands, which themselves even violate His known principles (can you say Abraham?).

5-Does your God hate any kind of creativity that goes outside the bounds of His pre-determined will?

6-And, is your God unable to find forgiveness for our mortal sins condemning us to eternal hell?

7-Is your God a misogynist who only created sex for procreation and not pleasure?

8-Does your God prohibit you from cutting your hair, eating shellfish or pork, and or going to church any day other than Sunday?

I hope not- though I know there are tens of millions of people whose God IS represented by those eight things above.

Sad isn’t it.

PS. When’s the last time you checked out this radical website- CLICK HERE!

Pakistani Islamic Fundamentalists brag that before 2010 they will control the army and therefore the nuclear weapons. And we worry about Iran that does not yet have what Pakistan already does?

Almost 50% of the American public believes that the Biblical prophecies that the earth will be destroyed by FIRE is a foretelling of a nuclear war. Whatever happened with the concept that the New Testament is spiritual in nature?

Christian fundamentalist have become increasingly apocalyptic!

What about the message of love, compassion, grace, forgiveness, and the Kingdom of God? Has the Cross failed or are we failing to discern WHO Jesus was and still IS? Jesus came to save the world and I believe He is more than capable.

We still have to deal with the “fundamentalists” though of every religion that are hell bent on killing everyone that’s not of their ilk.

If you’d like to see what the history of literal or fundamental lifestyle has produced, there is a five part series on LRCHouston.com…..CLICK HERE- starting Monday July 2 to Friday July 6.

There’s a cosmic background here, a cosmology, much like Matthew Fox spoke of (which got him ex-communicated from the Catholic church), that we’re all a part of. We are ONE with the Spirit of God, the Creator of ALL whether we understand that or not. We don’t even have to believe it. It is what it is regardless of your personal belief system.

So much for your ego!

I grew up with the stories about how Satan entered this world and did bad things, but God sent His Son from heaven to come down here on earth to save us, redeem us, and offer us eternal life- IF! You fill in the blanks on what all those IF’S might be, even if there’s only one. What this does is give to the world outside of church life (and for many struggling with it all within church life), a false and misleading concept of a supernatural invasion. This parody that I grew up with (much akin to Batman and Robin) wherein God takes this space-trip, dressed up as a man, known as Jesus, that we might see the “Godhead”.

I’ve seen Jesus, so I’ve seen God’s true representative!

More realistic is that we see in a MAN (Jesus) the true reality of who WE are to BE. And, that puts a lot of the responsibility for living life on US. Who the hell wants that! Who? No one. Who wants the responsibility to have a relationship with God, the Father? Let’s just set up some moral laws, throw in a few creeds, and add some denominational beliefs and there you have it. Just BELIEVE in those things and you ARE IN BABY!

The early phrase that was attested to was “totus in nostris” or wholly one of us”; which meant in his origin as well as his nature. And what that means is that I really do have someone I can follow- all the way to eternal bliss. Jesus, who became bigger than life- the Christ!

Maria Montessori’s research was a wake up call that few can relate to Jesus of God. She revealed that children who are abandoned early in life become our greatest threat to survival.

Alice Miller did a similar study indicating that the Holocaust might well have been as a result of the abandonment of Hitler and some of his key aids.

On the opposite front, one has to take notice of the fact that the stereotypical Jewish mother who smothers her children in love, has also nutured 30% of the Nobel laureates while being only 3% of the population.

Get the message?

See the point?

Since God is LOVE and that’s what the Bible says if anything why is the church and religion so much into “sin management“? Good question, don’tcha think?

1-Jesus died for our sins.

2-Jesus was a sacrificial lamb that made our forgiveness possible.

3-This was needed because God is a lawgiver and judge and He’s upset that we’ve violated His commandments.

4-Therefore we are all sinners!

5-God hates sinners and wants to kill them, and in fact, He can’t stand to have us in His presence and would not were it not for Jesus hiding our sins.

6-God will not forgive us unless some sort of blood atonement is made that’s acceptable to Him.

7-So, Jesus must die and be that blood atonement.

8-Jesus becomes a substitutionary sacrifice leading us into forgiveness and out of sin and guilt.

Not a very easy logic to sell is it? Is it even logical?

Maybe we should get back in touch with God and ask Him what He thinks. Mayve the church doesn’t have it all right yet.

When it comes to MIRACLES, Jesus is looked upon from one of two paradigms. Jesus was one of a kind miracle worker becuase He was divine. He had the genes, the stuff that God had and the miracles were just proof of His divinity.

I don’t think so!

Or, much like Marcus Borg and Walter Funk, and the Jesus Seminar group, the miracles were not real. They didn’t happen.

I think they did!

I believe Jesus did mriacles to show us what ANY MAN or WOMAN can do IF they relly open themselves up to the awesome omnipotence of God.

When one allows the creative, transforming power of God to flow through them because of the intimacy that they have- WOW!